Slime Mold Intelligence

Slime molds, a type of gelatinous amoebae, despite having no brains, have the capacity to form memories:

Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence

One species "can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu." When chopped into multiple pieces and scattered through a labyrinth, a specimen not only reunited its separated bits but modified its behavior to find the most efficient routes. As well as mapping their surroundings and retaining memories of areas they have explored, they apparently "navigate time as well as space, using a rudimentary internal clock to anticipate and prepare for future changes in their environments." The article describes some of the intriguing experiments that revealed slime molds' abilities. Lacking brains or nervous systems, nevertheless they "choose conditions most amenable to their survival" and "remember, anticipate and decide."

I once read a story in which two characters argue about the potential intelligence of some nonliving entity. One man asks, "With what would it think, in the absence of a brain?" The other one counters, "With what does a plant think, in the absence of a brain?" Do slime molds and plants "think"? If we equate intelligence with abstract thought, probably not; if we define it as the ability solve problems through adaptation, intelligence could be attributed to almost any kind of organism. If a centuries-old redwood has thought processes, they might operate on a time scale so different from ours that it couldn't communicate with us. If we visited a world dominated by sapient slime molds, would we recognize their intelligence and vice versa?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt